MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — A dedicated group of history students from Middle Tennessee State University has undertaken a meaningful project to study and revise the public tour experience at the Nashville Holocaust Memorial.

Students in assistant professor Ashley Valanzola’s “Holocaust Justice and Memory” class began the project with a guided tour of the memorial, located on the grounds of the Gordon Jewish Community Center at 801 Percy Warner Blvd. in Nashville.

As part of the collaboration, students were charged with conducting in-depth research into the content of the tour, aiming to expand pre-existing research on the Nashville Holocaust Memorial. They will offer student-led tours on Sunday, Dec. 7, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., with a reception to follow at the Pargh Arts Center.

Sharif Rashed, a history major from Collierville, Tennessee, said he has the opportunity to transcribe recordings and has enjoyed how the course has allowed him to apply the concepts he has been taught in class to this project, which has helped him better understand the material.

“Toward the beginning of the semester, having to transcribe some older recordings, (I couldn’t) see the bigger picture and felt confused, but the day we talked about the transcriptions in class, it clicked, and I understood the flow better,” he explained.

According to Valanzola, students were given the guided tour that jump-started the project courtesy of Marsha Raimi, the Nashville Memorial’s docent chair, who has also been auditing Valanzola’s class.

Rashed said the project has been the perfect way to connect with others in the Holocaust memorialization community.

“This opportunity allows students like me to cultivate connections with the Holocaust memorialization community,” said Rashed. “The project allows me to further my knowledge of the public history concentration as a whole while I still have that safety net or still riding my bike with training wheels.”

Rashed said this project has allowed him and his classmates to apply concepts they have learned in class and implement them in the real world.

Valanzola said she hopes the students working on this project will make lasting connections to Holocaust memorialization efforts in their own community.

“I hope they also grow together as a class through the collaborative aspects of the project and that they gain practical public history training they can take with them when they graduate,” she said.  

Through diligent historical inquiry, the students aim to do justice to the memory and symbolism that the Nashville memorial represents. To RSVP for the Dec. 7 guided tour, please email Ashley.Valanzola@mtsu.edu.

— DeAnn Hays (deann.hays@mtsu.edu)